Tag: Certified

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This is a Passivhaus Basics blog post that gives an overview of a specific aspect of the Passivhaus Standard.

The international Passivhaus Standard is a clearly defined and rigorous standard for energy efficiency, comfort and quality assurance of buildings. Designing a building to achieve the standard requires detailed knowledge and a rigorous methodical approach to design and documentation. To ensure this happens, it is possible to train and qualify as a Certified Passivhaus Designer or Consultant.

The route to certification is the same for a designer or a consultant. It is only the individual’s prior qualifications and experience that determines if they qualify as one or the other. For clarity, this post will only refer to a Certified Passivhaus Designer, but for all intents and purposes, ‘designer’ is interchangeable with ‘consultant’ in this context.

A Certified Passivhaus Designer, regardless of their prior qualification, works across disciplines on a Passivhaus project. Their role integrates architecture, structure, building services, building science, energy modeling and construction detailing. They will at times both support and challenge the other designers on a Passivhaus Project.

The Certified Passivhaus Designer on a project doesn’t need to be completely independent. They can also be the architect, structural engineer, building services engineer, or another consultant on the team. And the same person fulfilling two roles does have advantages. However, in many cases combining two roles requires more time and work than one individual has available. Regardless, it is best if the Certified Passivhaus Designer is an integral part of the design team rather than just an occasional consultant.

The Passivhaus Building Certifier must be independent of the design team.

A Certified Passivhaus Designer brings the detailed knowledge and rigorous methodical approach needed to design buildings to the international Passivhaus Standard.

043 What is a Passivhaus Designer

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This blog post is a review of “Hermann Kaufmann IZM: Illwerke Zentrum Montafon” published in April 2015, edited by Marko Sauer.

This is a beautiful book about a beautiful building. The IZM is a new 120m long, five-storey office building in the Montafon valley of the Vorarlberg region in Austria. It brings together, in a central location, both the civil and electrical engineers of the hydropower generation company, Illwerke Vorarlberg.

The Illwerke Zentrum Montafon (IZM) in Rodund is an unparalleled timber structure: with a usable floor area of over 10,000 m2, it was the largest office building made of wood in Central Europe on completion. Assembled in only six weeks, the timber construction above the concrete base is the first application of the LifeCycle Tower (LCT) system on the free market.

The building is an exemplar of integrated architecture. The alpine setting, materials research, modern technology, prefabrication, traditional craftsmanship, low energy / low carbon design, and social contribution all play their part in making the IZM a work of stunning Passivhaus architecture.

“Hermann Kaufmann IZM: Illwerke Zentrum Montafon” is an elegantly restrained monograph of essays, beautiful photographs and clear drawings. It is, in a sense, reflective of the building itself. It maintains the very high standard of presentation and technical detail that can be found in all Detail magazines and books.

Passivhaus architecture is integrated architecture. This book details an exceptionally beautiful work of integrated architecture.

031 Exceptional Integrated Architecture

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What is the fundamental purpose of a building?

Buildings serve several needs of society – primarily as shelter from weather, security, living space, privacy, to store belongings, and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical division of the human habitat (a place of comfort and safety) and the outside (a place that at times may be harsh and harmful).
– Wikipedia

As you can see, comfort is fundamental to the purpose of a building. So why do we find it so hard to ensure our buildings are actually comfortable? Why does our ‘world-class’ architecture still fail to provide comfortable buildings to live, work, learn and play in? (Besides using far too much energy and emitting far too much CO2!)

The Passivhaus Standard is known as the world’s foremost building energy efficiency standard. And it is that, but it is also a comfort standard. After all, what is the point of a building being energy efficient (or low carbon for that matter) if it compromises the functionality and comfort of the people who use the building? Passivhaus buildings provide exemplary comfort for the occupants by maintaining a healthy comfortable temperature, by being quiet, by having fresh air and by being draught-free.

Comfort is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

019 Love Passivhaus Comfort
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integrity
/ɪnˈtɛɡrɪti/
noun
1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.
2.the state of being whole and undivided.

Breaking promises damages your integrity. Do you make promises about the performance of buildings you design or construct? And do your buildings keep those promises?

Let me share a short story with you.

On a commission where I was the project architect, we reassured our clients that their new building would be super energy efficient, among other things. And yet, once the building had been handed over, I found myself in an embarrassing situation.

In a meeting with the clients, they put me on the spot and asked me why the energy bills were so high. No matter how many times I explained that the new building was much larger than their old building and had a lot more energy consuming equipment in it, there was no way out: in the clients’ mind we had not delivered on the promise of a super energy efficient building.

In fact, the new building was very energy efficient. However, we had never quantified what we meant by a “super energy efficient” new building. Therefore, the clients’ interpretation of this was lower energy bills and all they had to compare were the energy bills from their old building.

Needless to say, this project wasn’t a certified passivhaus building. Had it been, we could have given the clients an accurate prediction of what the (radically low) energy consumption would be. They would have had a good estimate of the expected energy bills. And the building would have performed as predicted. Our promise would have been kept.

Integrity is a reason to Love Passivhaus!

018 Love Passivhaus Integrity
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Climate change is one of the biggest threats we face today, as I wrote in a previous blog about ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’. Clearly we need to reduce CO2 emissions globally to zero, or to less than zero, to address climate change. We need to approach this in two ways: radical energy efficiency to reduce demand and de-carbonisation of energy generation, in other words, a massive scaling-up of renewable energy generation.*

In some situations these two approaches are going to manifest as ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’ or ‘Net-Zero Energy Buildings’. Even though there are many reasons why this is the wrong target (and if you read the comments you’ll find there are more than just the 9 reasons I wrote about.)

What then, is the best approach to achieving these notional targets of ‘Zero-Carbon Buildings’ or ‘Net-Zero Energy Buildings’?

Passivhaus First is the best approach and I explore why in this blog.

014 Zero Carbon Buidings Passivhaus First
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